Spirits summoned in fight vs mining

Compostela Valley, Philippines—The female “baylan” was at the midpoint of the ritual when she suddenly stopped. She felt something had perched on her arm and her chants fell to an abrupt crescendo.

It was an ill-omen, Datu Bernardo Limikid hushed to the crowd. Moments later, the ancient priestess’ ululations were again picking up.

She was performing the “ipat,” Limikid later explained. A ritual to appease the spirits of their long dead ancestors, it was performed atop one of the ridges of Sitio Butay in Barangay Pamintaran, a village in Maragusan town in Compostela Valley where the indigenous community is seething with discontent over the influx of people wishing to dig for gold said to be abundant there.

The Mansaka community considers the sprouting settlements intruders who could not only compete with them of the resources but, more importantly, could desecrate the place and trample on their culture.

“The spirits say much of this place was destroyed already,” the charlatan spoke to the mostly Mansaka crowd. The woman, in her mid-60s, said the “something” that she had felt was an emissary of the spirits that brought her the revelation.

Now, part of the ipat was the tribe’s pleas for the intercession of the Magbabaya, the supreme deity, and of the spirits, so they would succeed in preventing the rape of the hills of the village.

Quest for gold

What started it all was when substantial gold deposits were discovered by prospectors early in the year. The prospectors, who came from Luzon in search for copper, found gold nuggets along creeks and riverbeds in and around Pamintaran.

Word about the purported rich gold deposits spread like wildfire and before the indigenous community could react, gold-seekers from different panning areas in Compostela Valley swarmed the place like ants that had smelled a lump of sugar, according to Federico Plaza, a sub-leader of the municipal Mansaka tribal association.

“People from other areas are now the ones exploiting the place, while us, whose ancestors have already been here for generations are left out,” Plaza rued.

Worse, Limikid said, unregulated diggings destroyed not only the hills around Pamintaran but also encroached into areas considered sacred by the community.

When news of the Pamintaran gold rush broke out in May, the local and provincial government immediately “opened” the area to outsiders, the tribal leaders contended, and moneyed individuals—from miners to politicians, and even religious officials—poured capital and financed the operations of tunnels.

With the influx of gold-diggers, many of them bringing along their families, a virtual city of tents and bamboo sticks sprung up on the hillsides. Frantic digging of tunnels or holes also began in earnest, and with government regulation practically absent at the start, the diggings went unregulated.

Plaza said about a thousand “tunnels” have already been dug in the entire Sitio Butay, occupying 243 hectares of land.

Some of the tunnels were dug so close to each other that they collapse like sinkholes, Plaza said. Workers, a number of them kalumun (fellow tribesmen) serving as labors or ore carriers, were vulnerable to accidents.

“While our tribespeople are doing the backbreaking and often dangerous tasks at low wages, these financiers who are outsiders get the biggest share of the production. It’s really unfair,” the tribal chieftain said.

Pressured

The provincial government early this month ordered a halt to the mining operations in the area following a recommendation of environment officials about the possibility of a major “geological incident” due to cracks found on the ground there.

Gov. Arturo Uy said in an interview that the Mines and Geosciences Bureau (MGB) found a high “landslide hazard” in the area which could be exacerbated by a heavy downpour frequent during this time of the year.

The order dated Sept. 10, which was to be originally implemented 11 days later, was extended to Sept. 30 after tunnel operators asked for a grace period to the provincial government to give them ample time to transport their ores out from the mining area.

But Limikid, spokesperson of the Limpong ng Magkatadung sang Maragusan (Maragusan Federation of Tribal Chieftains), said the suspension of the mining operations was not the end of the problem. “(The provincial order) does not ensure us the operations indeed stopped,” he said.

Angry spirits

Limikid said miners belonging to the Maragusan Community Small-scale Miners Cooperative and seven other groups were able to dig after securing development permits from the local government without the tribe’s consent even if the area is part of the several thousands of hectares of ancestral land awarded to the indigenous community by the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP).

Part of the area being mined is the community’s ancestral burial ground which is considered sacred, he said.

“We made a position paper of our opposition to the continued mining in Pamintaran, so the provincial government was just pressured to order the closure of the area to mining,” Plaza said.

For 51-year old corn farmer Julio Lagidong, his opposition to the mining operations is more personal.

When several miners dug a hole in the sitio, they stumbled upon what appeared to be human remains. Lagidong said that what these people had discovered was his grandparents’ tomb. –Frinston Lim, Philippine Daily Inquirer